'Destiny 2' Will Run At 30 FPS On Xbox One X

The Xbox One X is on its way, and as you may have heard, it's the most powerful console ever made. That significant horsepower is meant to enable 4K, 60 FPS gaming on first-party and multiplatform games alike, offering a premium console experience for those users willing to pay. That 60 FPS, however, won't be the case for at least one of the major titles of the fall, Destiny 2. In a YouTube interview with Geoff Keighley, game director Luke Smith confirms that Destiny 2 will run at 30 FPS "on all consoles." Watch for it right at the end of the interview:

It highlights a parity problem that is bound to become an issue for an Xbox One X looking to show off all it's capable of. It's a beast of a console, but developers are always going to have to make sure that all games will run not only on the PlayStation 4 Pro but on the PS4 and Xbox One S as well. It's a real problem for a game like Destiny 2: the community requires Xbox One X and Xbox One S players to be able to play together, which would raise a lot of thorny questions about increasing performance on one platform. As Bungie made clear in the interview, these are questions they'd rather not answer. The language that Smith uses speaks to the power of standardization.

Xbox head Phil Spencer addressed the parity problem in an interview with Eurogamer where the conversation focused on Call of Duty. It's hard to quote because Spencer sidestepped the issue of whether or not he'd be concerned that a game like Call of Duty wouldn't take full advantage of the Xbox One X. Here's a snippet of a non-answer:

The capability is in this box to make the difference extremely significant. I think about the consoles in the market today, whether it's PS4, original Xbox One, S, Pro, it's all kind of closer in spec. We've hit a performance spec with Xbox One X that should make those games the most definitive version of those games.

Microsoft is no doubt pushing the hardware with first party studios, but this is going to be a problem when it comes to any third-party companies. They'll have to make the decision: how much effort do we put into optimizing a platform that's bound to be a relatively small part of the install base going forward? And as with PS4 Pro, we're probably going to see a very broad range of the degrees to which games are taking advantage of the new hardware. We'll get a better idea of what it all looks like when games start coming out in the fall and we can play them in our own homes.